Compliance

So Illinois passed Public Act 102-1116 that went into effect January 1, 2024. Basically, the convoluted language of the bill requires Illinois gun owners to register their “assault weapons,” any .50 caliber rifle or cartridge for said .50 caliber rifle, and “attachments” for their assault weapons which include:

(i) a pistol grip or thumbhole stock;
(ii) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the non-trigger hand;
(iii) a folding, telescoping, thumbhole, or detachable stock, or a stock that is otherwise foldable or adjustable in a manner that operates to reduce the length, size, or any other dimension, or otherwise enhances the concealability of, the weapon;
(iv) a flash suppressor;
(v) a grenade launcher;
(vi) a shroud attached to the barrel or that partially or completely encircles the barrel, allowing the bearer to hold the firearm with the non-trigger hand without being burned, but excluding a slide that encloses the barrel.

Anyway, all Illinois FOID holders who own said weapons or accessories were to register them online by January 1, 2024. Failure to do so is a Class 2 felony, punishable by 3-7 years in prison.

According to this YouTube video, here’s how that’s going:

So compliance seems to be about 2% at best.

Good on ya, Illinois. I wonder how soon there will be an arrest and prosecution under this law?

And I note, if you don’t possess an Illinois FOID card, but do possess a firearm, you won’t be punished under this law. So the gang-bangers who are doing almost all of the shooting are unaffected by this latest “gun control” measure.

Typical.

Going to Boomershoot 2024

I pulled the trigger, so to speak, tonight and reserved site 57 on the berm for Boomershoot 2024. This will be my third trip. My first was 2009 and second 2016. I’ll be taking the .300WM Remington 700 5R, and probably my Ruger Precision in .308. Possibly the Power Tool again, too.

I’m right next to a friend on site 58, so we can spot for each other, but there’s space available if you want to join me.

The shoot is May 3-5 in Orofino, Idaho, and it starts off with a BOOM!

Existential Threats

The dictionary definition of “existential” is “relating to existence,” so an “existential threat” to something is a threat to its existence. Another Chicxulub meteor impact is an existential threat to most life on Earth.

An existential threat justifies extraordinary actions, including but not limited to lawbreaking, violation of mores, etc. An armed robber is an existential threat to you. Killing that robber is justified by the seriousness of the threat. It’s homicide, but not murder to defend yourself when threatened.

“Global Climate Change” is pushed as an existential threat to all life on Earth, so apparently gluing yourself to a roadway or splashing tomato soup on classic paintings is wholly justified. So is sabotage and arson of construction equipment.

Jeffery Epstein was an existential threat to a lot of very powerful people.

So when you see headlines like this, you have to wonder what people will be willing to do to stop that existential threat:

Trump Movement Poses ‘Existential Threat’ to America: NYT Editorial Board – Newsweek

Biden argues Trump is an existential threat to America – ABC News

Donald Trump Is an Existential Threat to America and the World – Time

Why Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the future of the Republican Party | CNN Politics

Trump Is an Existential Threat – New York Times

Trump an Existential Threat: Messina on 2024 Polling – Bloomberg

Public intellectual Sam Harris, who is a philosopher, neuroscientist and author, was on a podcast wherein he defended the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. This man who advocates for Truth and Reason argued that it was a good thing that the story was suppressed, but he went even further:

Absolutely it was. Absolutely. But I think it was warranted. I don’t care what’s in Hunter Biden’s laptop. At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared.

“He then pivoted to an outlandish analogy that compared keeping Trump from winning a second term to working to ‘deflect’ an ‘asteroid hurtling toward Earth.'” (Source: New York Post.)

See what I mean?

So, SWAT raids on his home? Warranted.

Treason accusations? Warranted.

Rape accusations? Warranted.

Bogus prosecutions? Warranted.

And none of this is apparently working. He gets more popular every day.

So, if he’s an existential threat and none of that is working, what’s next? Who’s willing to do what to deflect this asteroid?

I guess those Sweet Meteor of Death memes were kinda right.

The Ruling Class

In August of 2010, just two years after America’s housing bubble collapsed taking world economies with it, Boston University Professor Emeritus of international relations Angelo Codevilla (PBUH) published his essay, America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution. It was, I think, a crucially important piece, and not just for the United States. I urge you to read, as they say, the whole thing, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to limit myself to a couple of excerpts.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use.

This is fairly new in the United States, but I think relatively common in many other nations where there has always been a Ruling Class that often acts against the wishes of the majority of the population. And I want to concentrate on the universality of this Ruling Class as it exists in the Western world and beyond. Codevilla again:

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Again, this is new to the U.S, but what has changed is that the Ruling Class elites of other nations, not limited to the West, were also formed largely in that same educational system. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and such, and not only nationally but internationally our Ruling Classes exhibit very similar attitudes and ideologies. For example:

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

This “Saviors of the Planet” attitude is hardly limited to the U.S. The divide here is more pronounced now that I can remember, and I’m approaching 62 years of age. I suspect it’s larger in other nations than ever before, as well.

I’m going to skip most of the rest of the piece, but again I seriously recommend you read it all. What I want to get to is this:

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled.

(Bold emphasis mine.) Remember, this was written in 2010, long before Brexit and Donald Trump. Now we have:

  • Brexit vote in June, 2016
  • The election of Donald Trump in November of that year
  • The Trucker’s Convoy in Canada
  • The rise of the Farmer’s Party and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands
  • The overthrow of the Sri Lankan government
  • The election of Giorgia Meloni in Italy
  • The election of Javier Milei in Argentina
  • Irish anti-immigration riots

As of this writing, Donald Trump is the leading candidate for President of the U.S. come 2024. Voters in many other nations are voting “Other” such as the example of the Farmer’s Party in the Netherlands, Meloni and Milei.

It would appear that what Codevilla termed “The Country Class” worldwide has decided to start demanding representation.

Whether that turns out well or badly depends on how the Ruling Class responds.

So far, it’s not looking good.

Seven Signs of a Police State

  • Mass surveillance of the populace
  • Systemic censorship
  • Indoctrination and propaganda in the schools and media
  • A One-Party state, with control of elections
  • Criminalization of dissent
  • Suppression of religious liberty
  • Political prisoners

Back in 2004 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote in his post “The Surreality of it all…

When I was perhaps nine or ten years old, I envisioned that the world in general and the government in particular was run by enlightened, virtuous men and women who proceeded forward in a wise and principled manner, striving to uphold lofty ideals, placing the interest of the People before the interest of the State.

{Pause to allow catcalls, smirks and hooting to die down….tapping feet….waiting patiently….looking at watch….beseeching heaven….ahem. Now I’ll continue.}

Obviously, the experiences of my life have taught me otherwise, but nonetheless, I do not begrudge my younger self’s naivete. That experience, even illusory, provided me with a precious and irreplaceable gift, something that far too many people will never have. For a few brief shining years, I was old enough to understand high ideals, and inexperienced enough to see how their implementation falls short in the world. In that state, I saw America not as it was, but as it should be, its promise completely and utterly fulfilled. The dazzle of its full glory will never fully leave my eyes.

I was right there with him. But then he also wrote:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We confer amongst ourselves, comparing what we see with the original blueprints, and the massive stack of tomes that are the revision manuals. We scratch our heads, and wonder if the self-corrective mechanisms, dimly seen deep in the interior maintain enough integrity to actually work. We step back, and squint, and watch the thing at work. Yes, gears are spinning, and cogs are turning, and there are interesting whoomphity whoomph sounds coming from it, but it seems that the output is pale and inferior, like grocery store branded cola.

That is not all that we see. As we pry our eyes from the shed in which our beloved old machine wheezes and coughs through the day, we notice that there is an assemblage of parts and subassemblies scattered about the green. Some of them are old, bits of flotsam and jetsam from history, and some are relatively new, having been hauled onto the commons to deal with recent events. Some of them are already turned on, and are spinning away, while others churn over only occasionally.

We’ve seen them there before, but we’ve never really SEEN them in quite the way that we see them now. Lately, they’ve been shuffled around a bit, as if to be assembled into something new. The way they have been shifted around suggests a purpose. The way they lay they all line up in a certain manner.

We who understand the forms and shapes of these things are alarmed. We recognize those shapes, and what they would become if pushed together, connected, and powered up.

We’ve seen them before.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

RTWT.

Heads. Should. Roll

(But of course, they won’t.)

Quote of the Day:

The real conspiracy is the same one you see everywhere. Government officials always assure us that we should hand over control and authority to them because they are “experts” who have our best interests at heart, but in reality, they are often clueless or inattentive to the bread and butter issues that can make or break a community.

Government is not and never will be some omnicompetent savior, and we have to abandon the idea that it is or can be. That doesn’t mean abandoning government agencies that can help, but it does imply that we shouldn’t rely on them and certainly shouldn’t take their word on anything. – David Strom

Maui Response is a Disaster

Prediction

In 2020 I wrote this:

In 2021 Time magazine published this piece:

Excerpt:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.



Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

Today we get this:

Excerpt:

A “rigged” election is not the same thing as a stolen election; stealing requires changing votes. “Rigging” is about changing the rules, the information landscape, or other factors that can influence voters using illegitimate means. Spreading misinformation can be a form of rigging, as of course censorship or “debunking” of true information.

I couldn’t say if the 2020 election was stolen–there certainly were irregularities as there always are in elections–because any vote changes or illegal ballots have to be in the right place in the right numbers, and no evidence has been accepted by courts indicating that enough illegal votes to change the results were cast.

And of course now we have lawfare against the leading candidate for the Republican side just as the 2024 campaign season is spooling up.

So, in honor of all that, let me present the new flag for the People’s Democratic Republic of America!

I’m not sure how long it will last, but it promises to be unpleasant.

♪Californication♫

Over at Quora the question was asked, “Is California as bad as the right wing says it is?” This answer from a gentleman named Ted Kord says this in response:

A very liberal buddy texted me a link two days ago along with the words “Fuck this shit!” No my buddy isn’t your average liberal. He’s a heavily tattooed, militant athiest hipster.

Not this guy, but you get the idea.

So what got my inked bohemian comrade so incensed?

Like me, my hipster amigo works as a California public school teacher. And over the last 10 years, discipline in general, and the sense of the teacher as an authority figure in particular, has been gutted by a very progressive legislature and two consecutive progressive governors.

I teach at a large high school that was once one of the 1000 best high schools in the United States. Back then it was a pretty nice place to teach. Now it’s pretty dystopian, with roving bands wandering the campus any time of day. If you like to keep your door open to get some fresh air, your instruction will be frequently interrupted by loud music, laughing, shouts, and the all-to-frequent eruption of profanity. I’m not talking about a couple times a day; I’m talking about several times per period. If you keep your door closed students will peer through the glass window looking for friends or bang on the doors and run away. If you go out and tell one the wandering bands to be quiet or get back to class, you WILL be met with expressions of defiance and disrespect. And that’s just dealing with the kids fooling around in the hall.

Poke your head out of my classroom anytime of the day and it’s going to look a lot like this.

Again, this is during class time. Teachers have been told they CANNOT LIMIT bathroom passes. Misbehavior prone students demand passes, then use those passes to wander campus, meet with friends, play on their phones, use intoxicants and deal drugs.

When it comes to your own students, you don’t have much more authority. If one of my students misbehaves, the harshest consequence I can give out is a phone call home. Maybe (and that’s a BIG MAYBE) if I’ve finally called home several times over a behavior, an administrator might actually issue a detention.

It’s not that the assistant principal for safety doesn’t want to help. His hands were tied by the state legislature. AB1729 passed a few years back making suspension of defiant students an extremely cumbersome and very time consuming process. The sheer commitment in time required to actually suspend a defiant student overwhelmed the capacity of administration. The legislature followed up with AB420 and SB419, each of which made the process more unwieldy. Pretty soon, no students could be suspended for defiance. But the law was so poorly written that it seemed to include (or exclude) a lot of behaviors.

A few years ago a student I wouldn’t let break the cell phone rule in class went off on me in a manner similar to how this student abused his teacher.

Even though I had previously called the student’s parents about his inappropriate classroom discussions about gangs, guns and fighting (documenting each call) the parents claimed I was picking on him and the student received only a 2-day class suspension. So for 2 days he sat outside the AP’s office playing on his phone, instead of actually working.

A few years back, my mentor teacher was walking down the hallway when she noticed a boy hanging out in the hallway. She asked to see his pass and reached for it. This 6 foot plus male cocked his arm back like he was going to punch her and yelled “I’ll smash your face.” My mentor, a 5′3″ tall, 60 plus year old woman stepped back and reported it to the office. The whole incident was captured on CCTV security cameras. The boy could be clearly seen taking a threatening, fist raised posture. But because she reached for the bathroom pass, the principal didn’t think administration could legally suspend the student.

Worse yet, the student claimed that he felt threatened by the diminutive AARP member. My mentor spent an entire weekend worried that she would be disciplined for the incident, even though she acted appropriately. She spent the weekend worrying that she would face discipline. The next Monday she went to the district office and filed her retirement paperwork. This was a tremendous loss to education. My mentor was one of the state’s leading expert in her subject matter, having written curriculum for entire states.

So what has my hipster amigo so angry?

California is in the process of passing two new laws to further gut discipline.

  • AB 599 will eliminate suspensions for students who come to school high or drunk, or use drugs on campus.
  • SB 274 will completely ban all suspensions and expulsions for willful defiance.

This is too much even for a counter-culture spirit who isn’t exactly opposed to marijuana.

California educators currently face daily, sometimes hourly incidents of defiance, disruption and deliberate disrespect. Many teachers have to deal with daily and ongoing behavior that would constitute a hostile work environment if those behaviors occurred in the private sector. Many of my colleagues have stress related health problems from dealing with unruly students whose uncorrected behavior gets worse.

Even if these bills don’t pass, behavior in California schools is already heading in a negative direction. The small minority of habitually disruptive students make life miserable and education untenable in many California schools. The passage of either bill will simply accelerate the deterioration of the Golden State’s schools.

I have no sympathy. This is completely, wholly self-inflicted. But it’s just one more indicator of the complete destruction of public education due to the ideologies of the Left. I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education. He published it thirty years ago. I have to stop from time to time due to the RCOB it invokes. And I know it’s gotten far worse since then. For example: Chicago Democrat sounds alarm as 55 schools report no proficiency in math or reading: ‘Very serious’ Ya THINK?!? Chicago spends at minimum $10k per pupil, up to $15k. And these are the results.

Get out of California while you still can. Chicago as well. And get your kids out of public schools EVERYWHERE.

I Wish I’d Written This

In accordance with the long-standing tradition of this blog, when I find something I really think is relevant and well-written, I repost it with attribution. Usually it’s an excerpt. Or ten. Occasionally, it’s an entire piece. Today is one of those “entire piece” days. I meant to cross-post it here some time back, but things happened and it slipped my mind, but now I’m fixing that. By permission, from a post at Facebook by Brad R. Torgerson:

Long thought. Don’t say you had no warning.

The explicitly secular perspective is that there is no proof of a spiritual layer to human experience, therefore this spiritual layer does not exist. Or if it exists, it exists purely as a construct of the human mind. A figment. Untestable. And that while it’s all well and good to have morals, principles, and values, any of these things rooted in spiritual soil—amounting to supernatural belief in that which is unseen and unknown—is self-delusion. Perhaps even dangerous self-delusion?

But I ask: what of the self-delusions of those who turn their backs on “old time” faith? Surely by now it’s abundantly evident that those who deny the old churches and the old ways of believing (coping?) merely fashion new churches and new beliefs (again, coping?) to explain not just how the world and the universe work, but what our purpose in this world ought to be. Why we’re here. Or, if not why, what we ought to be doing with ourselves during our finite lives.

The Marxists replaced God with the State. Whose purpose was to perfect the human condition. But which did in fact make immense human misery across the decades of the Marxist Century (1920-2020.) And there are Marxists who insist to this day that their paradigm is the paradigm which will own the human future. They agitate for this. Protest for it. Threaten it.

How is the belief of the devout Marxist—after an entire century of woe, pain, death, and suffering on every continent—in any way different from the belief of, say, a Catholic? Or a Muslim? Or a Mormon?

We have all the proof in the world that Marxist economies and Marxist governments are doomed to failure, and waste human life at an unconscionable level. Yet the Marxist, like a Scientologist, seems to think we’ve yet to achieve the necessary level of understanding (cough, “OT,” cough) which will make the perfection of the human condition possible. So we need to try one more time.

Always, there is one more time. Disregard all the awfulness of the past hundred years. It just doesn’t matter. We need to do it again, comrades!

Is this not a church? Is this not unbreakable faith? Despite all the evidence telling us it’s unfounded?

And now we have sexual and ethnic identitarianism, as well as environmentalism, rolled up into the Marxist tapestry. The purpose of the State is not just the perfection of the human condition, it’s also the salvation of the planet from certain catastrophic climate doom. As well as the full liberation of the transhuman mind to express itself as any gender it wants, any sexual flavor it can conceive. And all of this must be respected and enshrined by human activity as well as interactivity.

I’d call anything that denies the realities of biology and medical science, a kind of religious faith. Faith in the plasticity of people such that they can decide things for themselves which nature (or God, if you prefer) decided in the womb. A sort of gender and sexual Lysenkoism. The politics tell us it is so, so it must be so. Even when our genes and our bodies tell us, “Nope.”

I’d also call anything that revolves around doom prophecies of climate Armageddon, borderline cult-ish.

Consider: if you’re a street preacher who hangs a sign on his body and stands on the corner shouting, “The end is near!” they call you crazy. But if you’re Greta Thunberg and you go to a posh international conference and shout into a podium mic, “The end is near!” they put you up at the nicest hotels, publish your books to international fanfare, and make you rich.

And I’ve barely addressed the priests and priestesses of anti-racism. Consider someone like Robin DiAngelo, who’s made herself into a millionaire selling white guilt to wine moms. How is this any different from a plastic-haired televangelist who used to sell fire-and-brimstone guilt to evangelicals?

So, I think we have to conclude that humanity is in fact wired for faith. And even if we throw out the old churches and the old ways, we just invent new churches and new ways.

And I am frankly scared to death of the new churches. Cultural Marxism. Environmental Marxism. Equity Marxism, as preached by the anti-racists. It’s all prosecuted with a kind of religious zeal. Especially regarding punishment of designated evil-doers. Do not get caught being a kulak, comrade. It might not go well for you when the rainbow Cheka comes.

At least the old churches (many of them, anyway) bend a knee to a higher power. Concede that innocence is the default state of man, not guilt. And present a path for rehabilitation and redemption. Both temporal and spiritual. Our entire Western Enlightenment edifice of temporal law is predicated on it. Men are to answer for their own crimes, not the crimes of others. Collective guilt is anathema. You can’t punish a person merely for belonging to a category.

That last bit—about punishing people for their demographics—has been the focus of equality activism in America since the inception. And we had almost reached this point where everyone agreed it was wrong to exclude, defame, slander, judge, or jail anybody because of their sex, their gender, their ethnicity, who they sleep with, who they marry, et al.

But the new gods are jealous, and seek to drive out the old God. New types of sin are invented to replace the old type. And new villainy is invented to replace the old villainy.

Consider, stealing is no longer wrong, but misgendering somebody is.

Consider also, you can sleep around all you want, no harm no foul, but you better give up your car and buy an EV, or you’re a wretched climate sinner.

These are just two examples. I could spell out many, many others. I am sure you could, too. And is it not all just religion? Is it not just scriptures and a holy class of learned clerics piously insisting, while also making accusations of wrong, followed by threats of damnation? Except, nobody’s in their box ready to hear your confession. Give you penance. Nor will there be baptism for the cleansing of sin. No salvation promised. Merely incrimination.

For being a kulak, comrade.

A race kulak. A gender kulak. A sex kulak. A climate kulak. Sooner or later the bleeding edge of self-styled intellectual progress gets around to branding everyone a kulak for some reason. And each new breed of iconoclasts topples the statues and touchstones of the old, to in turn be toppled again by the iconoclasts who come after. Revolution as the perpetual state of things. Endless overturning of all that is established, for all that is new. Or believed to be new.

Is this insistence on perpetual revolution—especially as it destroys good and necessary institutions—not a kind of religious fanaticism?

Oh, there might not be any God in any of it, per se, but the zeal is the same as that possessed by the legendary mob who set fire to the library of Alexandria.

We must keep pushing the Year Zero button, comrade! The perfection of the human condition is at hand!

I want to hope that we can snap back from this. That we haven’t so thoroughly shed our Christian Enlightenment skin that the entire project tips into the sea of history. And in a thousand years some future civilization has to try to re-invent all that we made and did, from 1500 A.D. to 2000 A.D. Learning all the lessons all over again. Following an interminable dark age of suffering, ignorance, and a massive backsliding for the human species, from where we were at in 1999.

But the candle of my hope flickers too much these days. I see how easily the doctrines and gospels of the new religions fire the eyes of too many. Who’re absolutely certain in their hearts they’ve got all the answers.

Just like the Bolsheviks of 1920, the Neo-Bolsheviks of our time are going to bring it all down. Then make it all new again, in their own image. Because people who’ve never built anything in their lives, know precisely how civilization and society ought to be rebuilt.

Their faith in themselves and their ideas tells them this is true. And they will seemingly not be dissuaded.